The Dream of the Nineties Animation Boom Is Alive in ‘Wildwood’

There are animation houses that traffic in snarky humor, pop-culture references and easy-peasy life lessons — and then there’s Laika. The Pacific Northwestern studio that gave us Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings has the artisanal and regional feel of an indie record label; it’s like the K Records of stop-motion toons.

And those vaguely hipster Portlandia vibes are very much present in Wildwood, partially in the form of light self-mockery and partially in the quirky darkness (or maybe it’s dark quirkiness) that colors its YA fantasy story. As if Laika’s homebase in Hillsboro, the Oregon region known colloquially as the Silicon Forest, weren’t strong enough bona fides, this modern fairy tale gets its source material from a 2011 novel by the Decemberists‘ frontman Colin Meloy and his illustrator spouse Carson Ellis. The dream of the Nineties is very much alive in this coming-of-age tale. So is the dream of the Nineties animation boom, in which flying freak flags and previously untapped emotional frequencies helped fuel a renaissance.

It’s the movie’s affectionate recreation of Portland, in fact, that strikes you first, a moveable handcrafted feast of boho coffee shops, funky farmer’s markets, street sculptures, and the bibliophile’s promised land that is Powell’s Books. (Keep an eye out for a cameo from a bike messenger who looks mighty familiar.) The specificity of the landscape is grounding. It also provides an urban playground for Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a teen who is tasked with looking after her little brother Mac. Her crunchy-granola Mom and Dad (Maya Erskine and Jake Johnson) seem more than a little overprotective of their youngest child; the reluctant babysitter is given strict instructions not to leave the premises. Don’t go beyond the fence. Definitely don’t go into downtown. And whatever you do, stay away from the densely forested area known as the “Impassable Wilderness.”

Naturally, Prue dumps her sibling into a red wagon, bikes with him down to Voodoo Donuts for a treat, and generally disobeys her hippie-dippy parents. She runs into Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), a smitten fantasy nerd who might have once rolled a 20 in cleric magic but has come up snake eyes when it comes to interacting with girls. They’re so busy arguing that they almost don’t see the ominous murder of crows that seem to have their collective eyes on Mac. One Hitchcock homage later, the birds have stolen Prue’s baby brother. She and Curtis follow the avian kidnappers deep into the woods to retrieve him. And once they enter the center of the Impassable Wilderness? Chaos reigns.

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Chaos, and celebrity-voiced eccentrics: Carrie Mulligan shows up as a warrior queen of the forest who seems maternal, until she very much doesn’t. Mahershala Ali leads the resistance against the malevolent powers that be as a rebel bandit. Tom Waits lends his feral baritone to a commander of a coyote military brigade. Awkwafina serves up a nice Templeton homage as a hungry rat, Angela Bassett provides the proclamations of a regal eagle, Jemain Clement snivels his way through a bureaucratic-toady role, and Richard E. Grant is wisely cast as a sagely, albeit imprisoned owl. Listen closely, and you’ll hear Blythe Danner, Rob Delaney, Charlie Day, and Killers of the Flower Moon‘s Tantoo Cardinal pipe in their recognizable two cents as well.

Eventually, it’s revealed that the resident smooth-talking royal has a backstory that involves the film’s unsettling preamble, in which an automaton rips out his clockwork heart and plummets to his death. Like we said: Shit gets dark. And Prue’s helicopter parents may have a legitimate reason for all that worry, given that they once made a Faustian bargain that their headstrong daughter will now be forced to make null and void. It’s worth mentioning that war is brewing in this multi-species inner world, and like the legion of other YA fantasy franchises that Wildwood liberally, begs, borrows, and steals from — you keep wondering whether a lion or a wardrobe will pop up after every one of Mulligan’s witchy line readings — it’s all going to come to head during a epic showdown between good and evil.
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We may have become jaded after so many afternoons in multiplexes spent being subjected to so many knock-down, drag-out battle royales in so many movies. That could be why, when director Travis Knight and his crack team of stop-motion commandos stage these impressively rendered yet extremely familiar sequences, it feels more like a triumph of animation than imagination. And then, just when you feel a certain numbness creeping in from the sound and fury, the movie will drop a bomb on you — a wide shot that resembles a Bosch painting; a revenge-of-the-vegetation showstopper — that leaves you quietly muttering, “Whoa.”

Yes, Wildwood is a little mild in its storytelling, even with its takeaways being a little more complicated than your average tween-friendly feature. (“I thought growing up was supposed to give you all the answers, but it just gives you more questions,” Prue says at one point. Shots fired, Disney!) But technique-wise, it’s a display of the sort of human touch in animation that can often seem sorely lacking, and that Laika has turned into a house special. It’s not a product, so much as the product of people who care about proving that, to quote a wise man, animation is cinema and not a genre.